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Anticipating Dracula
Wednesday, 1 January 2020 16:51Fairly obviously, I am in a state of high excitement about the new adaptation of Dracula which starts this evening on BBC1. But also a little nervous, because it's Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, and their co-productions often seem stylish and attractive at first glance but then collapse into insubstantial disappointment on closer inspection.
The trailers look promising:
Dracula is clearly going to be both extremely sexy and extremely evil, which is exactly what I'm after from him. It evidently won't be following the novel very precisely, but Dracula as a story has enjoyed such success since its publication in large part because its adaptations never have done. In this case it looks like one change will be additional female characters with purpose and agency, which is good. (Maybe even a person of colour ditto, but it's hard to be wholly sure from the trailer.) And it's clearly going to be visually stunning - the sumptuous, gory logic of the Hammer aesthetic turned up to eleven and with the benefit of overseas location shooting and good CGI.
My main niggling worry at the moment is about the use of quips. There's one in the trailer I've embedded above - Dracula with his cane self-consciously swaggering (even though he seems to be sitting down) and saying "I'm undead; I'm not unreasonable." This Conversation article by Catherine Spooner (a Gothic literature specialist) who saw a preview screening of the first episode suggests there will be quite a few more. She gives some examples, and notes: "There are more zingers to come as Bang quips his way across Europe like an infernal James Bond."
This could work. If set off effectively against Dracula's malign motivations and brutality, it could throw them into sharp relief and make them more effective, in a similar way (though with a different palette) to the contrast between Christopher Lee's suave, gentlemanly welcome when Jonathan Harker arrives at his castle in Hammer's Dracula and his snarling hurricane of bestial rage later on. It might even reflect thought-provokingly on our own current climate of political discourse, in which superficial cleverness and deliberately-cultivated buffoonery seem to function as effective masks for power-hungriness and a disdain for the suffering of others. Then again, it might turn out to just be superficial cleverness in itself, there to distract us from other weaknesses in the script and only diluting the impact of Dracula as a character. I don't yet know, and I'm going to try to keep an open mind about it.
Certainly, and again as Catherine Spooner notes in her Conversation article, comic relief has a long-standing place in Gothic horror, and in Dracula stories in particular. Stoker put in plenty of it, particularly in his characterisations of people of lower social status than his main characters. This description, sent to Seward by a colleague he has left in charge of his asylum while he is away, of his encounter with two men who had been attacked by Renfield while delivering boxes of earth to Dracula's house at Carfax, always makes me laugh:
That's quite a long way from having Dracula himself cracking the jokes, though. Stoker has Dracula mock and gloat at the human characters, but not indulge in knowing word-play. Hammer gave him the occasional ironic line, as in Satanic Rites when he brushes off Van Helsing's enquiries about the deadly strain of plague bacteria which he has commissioned by explaining that he has political goals, and that "To lend weight to one's arguments amid the rush and whirl of humanity it is sometimes necessary to be... persuasive." Not quips, though. Still, Catherine Spooner is right that Bela Lugosi's most famous line - "I never drink... wine" - shows that Dracula can indulge in devilish self-conscious humour without undoing his menace. Let's hope that will remain true this evening.
The trailers look promising:
Dracula is clearly going to be both extremely sexy and extremely evil, which is exactly what I'm after from him. It evidently won't be following the novel very precisely, but Dracula as a story has enjoyed such success since its publication in large part because its adaptations never have done. In this case it looks like one change will be additional female characters with purpose and agency, which is good. (Maybe even a person of colour ditto, but it's hard to be wholly sure from the trailer.) And it's clearly going to be visually stunning - the sumptuous, gory logic of the Hammer aesthetic turned up to eleven and with the benefit of overseas location shooting and good CGI.
My main niggling worry at the moment is about the use of quips. There's one in the trailer I've embedded above - Dracula with his cane self-consciously swaggering (even though he seems to be sitting down) and saying "I'm undead; I'm not unreasonable." This Conversation article by Catherine Spooner (a Gothic literature specialist) who saw a preview screening of the first episode suggests there will be quite a few more. She gives some examples, and notes: "There are more zingers to come as Bang quips his way across Europe like an infernal James Bond."
This could work. If set off effectively against Dracula's malign motivations and brutality, it could throw them into sharp relief and make them more effective, in a similar way (though with a different palette) to the contrast between Christopher Lee's suave, gentlemanly welcome when Jonathan Harker arrives at his castle in Hammer's Dracula and his snarling hurricane of bestial rage later on. It might even reflect thought-provokingly on our own current climate of political discourse, in which superficial cleverness and deliberately-cultivated buffoonery seem to function as effective masks for power-hungriness and a disdain for the suffering of others. Then again, it might turn out to just be superficial cleverness in itself, there to distract us from other weaknesses in the script and only diluting the impact of Dracula as a character. I don't yet know, and I'm going to try to keep an open mind about it.
Certainly, and again as Catherine Spooner notes in her Conversation article, comic relief has a long-standing place in Gothic horror, and in Dracula stories in particular. Stoker put in plenty of it, particularly in his characterisations of people of lower social status than his main characters. This description, sent to Seward by a colleague he has left in charge of his asylum while he is away, of his encounter with two men who had been attacked by Renfield while delivering boxes of earth to Dracula's house at Carfax, always makes me laugh:
The two carriers were at first loud in their threats of actions for damages, and promised to rain all the penalties of the law on us. Their threats were, however, mingled with some sort of indirect apology for the defeat of the two of them by a feeble madman. They said that if it had not been for the way their strength had been spent in carrying and raising the heavy boxes to the cart they would have made short work of him. They gave as another reason for their defeat the extraordinary state of drouth to which they had been reduced by the dusty nature of their occupation and the reprehensible distance from the scene of their labours of any place of public entertainment. I quite understood their drift, and after a stiff glass of strong grog, or rather more of the same, and with each a sovereign in hand, they made light of the attack, and swore that they would encounter a worse madman any day for the pleasure of meeting so `bloomin' good a bloke' as your correspondent.Hammer, too, in whose footsteps Moffat and Gatiss are clearly following at least as much as Stoker's, also have a grand tradition of comic relief characters. Their Dracula gives us the easily-bribed Frontier Official who gets his toll barrier broken twice during the final climactic chase back to the castle, and Miles Malleson's wonderful absent-minded undertaker with a black sense of humour.
That's quite a long way from having Dracula himself cracking the jokes, though. Stoker has Dracula mock and gloat at the human characters, but not indulge in knowing word-play. Hammer gave him the occasional ironic line, as in Satanic Rites when he brushes off Van Helsing's enquiries about the deadly strain of plague bacteria which he has commissioned by explaining that he has political goals, and that "To lend weight to one's arguments amid the rush and whirl of humanity it is sometimes necessary to be... persuasive." Not quips, though. Still, Catherine Spooner is right that Bela Lugosi's most famous line - "I never drink... wine" - shows that Dracula can indulge in devilish self-conscious humour without undoing his menace. Let's hope that will remain true this evening.
